Steinbeck's "In Dubious Battle", Reviewed by Jack Seney

Jack recounts the hardships of his Irish ancestors. My German grandfather suffered at the hands of the Irish. I told his story here.

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"In Dubious Battle" of 1936 is one of those lesser-known John Steinbeck novels that deserves to be more widely read. About a strike by desperately underpaid workers in the apple-picking countryside of California, it focuses on two worker-level communists attempting to organize the laborers. It is based on actual events as is the case with many Steinbeck novels (and in the actual events, the strike achieved its goals as the workers received raises).

The story here is both detailed and fast-paced and is full of twists as the strike for better wages quickly becomes violent. It is the landowning capitalists who turn it so. But the "use who we have to for the cause" communists are no great heroes either.

This book employs slang and speech patterns common to the 1930s which were no less real than those Americans have now, post-TV. There is but little humor to be found here, as most everyone has been chiseled dead serious by poverty and the pressures of labor activism. Here Steinbeck explores "common man" tragedy, but provides no clear conclusion and no easy answers. There is also an animal-slaughter spot I could have done without, but at least it's brief.
Despite the brooding atmosphere, characters here are colorfully individualist and easily remembered. Here modern readers might be shocked to find "white" people as the dirt-poor, overworked, badly underpaid strikers. A lack of good education that is not their fault, and a lack of self-education that might very well be, has had generations of Americans until now believing that only "people of color" have suffered oppression in the U.S.

I have long known differently as I know what my Italian Catholic grandmother went through starting from the Harlem of 1900 and into her time as a Ladies Garment Workers union member, what my Irish Catholic immigrant ancestors went through before her and what I go through now. The American economic system is color-blind in its oppression of workers and itself creates color barriers between people to divide the poor working class and dilute its strength.
Steinbeck would recognize this if he were here now. In his heyday, though, there was nothing to recognize. The poor workers of his 1930s California were just about entirely white and included some Italian and other poor European immigrants as is demonstrated in "In Dubious Battle."

Steinbeck would write about Mexican Indians in "The Pearl" and include blacks in "Of Mice and Men," but in this his main labor novel it is extreme white poverty that is overwhelmingly portrayed. Such poverty continues today - nearly 60% of poor American children are recorded as being white - much the same as back then.
Steinbeck was disliked by leftists and conservatives alike for "In Dubious Battle," and all his novels were looked down on by literary effetes as being too much about the lowly and not enough about style, as if writing about the poor and troubled were not itself a part of his style in books like this one, "The Grapes of Wrath" and others.
Steinbeck grew up middle class in California and had his higher education readily available. Some claim he grew up "rich," though this is unlikely as his father was known to have suffered a large business failure. Regardless, Steinbeck spent some time as a laborer to learn how the working poor live.

Never becoming a communist, Steinbeck nonetheless remained on the side of lower class workers and was skeptical of capitalism regardless of its rewards for him personally. This is the test that writers must pass, with Steinbeck never selling out and may God bless him for it.
Personally, Steinbeck was not an angel and has been accused by one biographer of arranging an abortion for his first wife. If true, he did this to the same wife who was dedicated to typing his manuscripts and helping him with his writing. But there is also no questioning his dedication to the lowly, which he maintained after achieving the same upper-class status of his fancy critics.

Steinbeck kept writing books and would eventually become a Vietnam War supporter, though he might have seen this as a way to reward the Lyndon Johnson administration for its "Great Society" programs for the supposed relief of the poor. The extent to which these have helped many people is doubtable, but Steinbeck would not have known about that at the time. Another motive might have been that his son was a soldier in the war, though he would later turn against it.

Steinbeck books have been both banned in and taught by American schools, depending on location. Though believed by many to be an agnostic, it seems that Steinbeck was actually a longtime Episcopalian. He died in New York in 1968 at age 66, having long made a rare transplant from the warmer U.S. coast to the colder one.